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Hello, my name is Derek Manky, and I am the chief security strategist and VP of Global Threat Intelligence at 40Gret Labs.

When I started, cybercrime was not known to many people.

Now, you know, when people ask what I do and I say, oh, I'm in cybersecurity, there's a lot of interest actually, which is a good sign.

If you talk about cybersecurity, people think it's highly technical and some aspects are, of course, but they just don't know where to start.

My father bought me a 286 system when I was about seven years old and I was the only kid on a block with the computer at the time.

And I loved it.

So I knew I always wanted to do something in tech.

I didn't know security at that point.

But I did have this dream in a high school of becoming mission control for NASA,

working with mission critical systems in order to work in high stress environments, I guess, to have a big impact.

Post-secondary, I got into, of course, computer science and system technology and did a lot of coding.

I loved programming, and so that was my 24-hour routine, it seems, right?

A lot of low-level languages working not only with C and C++, but assembler and X-86 code.

And that got me into more debugging and then reverse engineering, which inherently, again, I wasn't thinking of a security track at the time, but just being really passionate and interested about that,

naturally it got me interested in malware and computer viruses as well, how they work.

I had a lot of passion around programming,

so I became a teacher for a while.

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